Charlie Chan à l'opéra

My favorite of the Warner Oland Chans, Charlie Chan At the Opera, is an excellent entry in the series. It begins like a horror film, on a stormy night, as Boris Karloff overcomes a guard in a sanitarium, then escapes. We are then introduced to a motley group of characters, including a temperamental opera diva, who has been recieving threatening notes, then Charlie and son arrive, and soon the action moves to the opera house, where the film remains. Karloff turns up backstage, where he is hiding, above the dressing rooms, and we soon learn the truth: he is a famous singer who had supposedly died in a fire but escaped, and has been suffering from amnesia ever since. He has only recently begun to remember who is, and is now looking for the person who tried to kill him.

There's a lot of plot in this film, and it isn't brilliantly developed. What makes the movie so watchable is the acting, which is uniformly good (and in Karloff's case outstanding); the music, courtesy of Oscar Levant, who wrote the score; the set design, which is marvelous; and occasionally the dialogue, which is often funny. Director Bruce Humberstone juggles all these elements masterfully, making the movie hum. Karloff brings gravitas and real menace to his part, and elicits pity as much as terror. Oland is his usually Buddha-like self, delivering his fortune cookie homilies with aplomb. William Demarest is the Irish cop this time around. As was so often the case with murder mysteries, a suggestion of the supernatural helps the mood enormously. Karloff isn't quite the phantom of the opera, but people react to him as if they've seen a ghost, since they all assume that he's dead.

The movie is a very accomplished piece of work. Its theatre and backstage atmosphere give it the feeling of a show within a show, and it's a pretty good one whichever way you look at it.

A madman loose in an opera house is the background for Charlie Chan to investigate a double murder of leading singers in Charlie Chan At The Opera. Son Lee Chan played by Keye Luke even gets in the act as a member of the chorus with his fraternity buddies.

Boris Karloff is the madman, but if I had gone through what he had been through I'm sure I would have become unhinged myself. Some years back Karloff was trapped in a burning opera house by his cheating wife and her tenor lover. He was presumed dead and burned up, but in fact has been an amnesiac patient in a mental asylum. A glance at a newspaper story about the opera brought his memory and a resolve to escape the asylum and seek out his tormentors.

This probably was Karloff's way of playing and not playing the Phantom Of The Opera. As he was in the Frankenstein films or playing The Mummy, Karloff is both a frightening yet pitiable figure. He truly steals this film from Warner Oland as Charlie Chan.

As for Oland he has to solve a pair of murders that occur while Karloff is on the loose. In that he has to work with thick as a brick police sergeant William Demarest. In fact Demarest makes a few racial remarks in Oland's direction, but in the end he's a convert to the wisdom of Chinese parables.

This is one of the best Charlie Chan features and one of the best of the Oland Chan films which were given much better production than later when the series moved to Monogram.

According to my sources, there seems to be a slight disagreement on the singing in this movie. Denis Gifford's Karloff bio says that Karloff did his own singing (and he could have; he was a fair baritone and sang in the Dulwich College chorus). Oscar Levant's autobiography claims that Karloff was dubbed. Oscar Levant, however, seems to have been writing from an unreliable memory, as he gets other details wrong including the movie synopsis. There are three singing voices heard in the movie: soprano, tenor, and baritone. The tenor was never seen, but was heard onstage while Chan and Number One Son were backstage. Both actresses playing sopranos were synching to the same recording. Karloff may also have been synching to a recording, but it could well have been his own, both for the reason given above and because Levant's opera was written for the movie--no previous recordings existed at the time, and why would the studio have spent extra money on a second singer for a B-budget film when they already had someone on the film who could handle the baritone singing? (Even the Faust costume worn by both baritones onstage was secondhand--it was first worn by Lawrence Tibbett in "Metropolitan", filmed earlier in 1936!)

Murder, mayhem, and a load of Chinese maxims flood an opera house in San Francisco where a star baritone and a star diva are killed. The police are on the case and they also have asked for the help of Honolulu detective Charlie Chan. This is a real entertaining, fun film to watch. Warner Oland goes through one Chinese proverb after another to remain enigmatic, and yet shed some light on the proceedings. Oland does a nice job as Chan and adds subtlety to not so subtle occurrences. A mad man has escaped from an asylum and has hidden himself within the opera house for reasons unknown to the police. The man is played by none other than the great Boris Karloff. Karloff is a bit restrained in his performance but does add some menace and depth. Watching Karloff sing baritone(with someone's dubbed voice) is quite a sight! Keye Luke is back as Chan's over-eager beaver son. William Demarest plays a somewhat annoying policeman who discredits Chan's abilities really for being an Oriental. The subtle prejudicial undertones of his actions are a bit disturbing. A good script with plenty of humour and lots of Chan!

Fans of Charlie Chan, Boris Karloff or both should find little to dislike about Charlie Chan at the Opera. Count me as someone who likes Karloff a great deal and gets a fair amount of pleasure watching the Charlie Chan film series. The general consensus is that Charlie Chan at the Opera is one of the best of the series, and it is a consensus that I agree with wholeheartedly. If there is anything that didn't work very well, it was that that Boris Karloff's singing was dubbed very obviously with the sloppy lip synch and the singing voice sounds very little like Karloff when he speaks(Karloff probably did have some singing talent, but there is a lot of truth in what has been said already that he probably wouldn't have been an actor if he was THAT good). Tudor Williams does dub him brilliantly though, the dark velvety quality(that is fairly reminiscent of the great baritone Lawrence Tibbett) of his voice makes him captivating and thrilling to listen to. That aside, the film is very pleasing to look at, well shot with effectively used settings. The Mephistopheles costume was really striking and Karloff looks very imposing(he always did though) in it. The music is grandiose, playful and beautiful, the opera Carnival was composed especially and it is well-utilised and is one that you wish made appearances on the opera stage. Apart from the lip-synch, Karloff is still very good here, he is charismatic and formidable but clearly knows how to have a good time. Warner Oland is spot-on as a character that suits him to a tee, in particular he really relishes his hilariously droll lines and it shows in his sly delivery of them. The dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, Charlie Chan's lines are like little bon bons and you have to love the nod to Karloff and one of his most iconic roles. All the acting is very good though. The scenes with William Demarest are every bit as fun as those with Karloff and Oland. The mystery parts of the story are well-paced, have good amounts of suspense- not too obvious or predictable- and keeps your "little grey cells"(in the words of Agatha Christie and her immortal creation Hercule Poirot) working, complete with some great atmosphere. Overall, non-stop entertainment from start to finish. 9/10 Bethany Cox